Goldendict is a cross-platform (Linux/Unix/MS-Windows/Apple OS X) and dictionary lookup app written in QT. This application support of multiple dictionary file formats. The program can search Wikipedia, Wiktionary, or any other MediaWiki based sites to perform lookups. You can listen to pronunciations for any word or setup text to speech to read out pronunciations. The dictionary also provides word stemming and spelling suggestions. You can also use this program to find out translations of words and phrases for different languages. A commercial mobile version is also available for Android based devices.

Geany is a great and light weight cross-platform integrated development environment for Linux and Unix based systems. It supports C, C++, Java, PHP, Python and 50+ other programming languages. Geany is known to run under Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, MacOS X, AIX v5.3, Solaris Express and Windows. Geany more closely resembles programming editors available for Microsoft Windows such as Notepad++. So if, you are switching from MS-Windows to Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/Mint or BSD/OS X/Unix like platform try geany IDE.

Linux on the desktop is making great progress. However, the real beauty of Linux and Unix like operating system lies beneath the surface at the command prompt. nixCraft picks his best open source terminal applications of 2012.

Samba is a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol. Samba version 4 has been released. It is a major rewrite that enables Samba to be an Active Directory domain controller. I have been waiting years for this option.

Nmap is short for Network Mapper. It is an open source security tool for network exploration, security scanning and auditing. However, nmap command comes with lots of options that can make the utility more robust and difficult to follow for new users.

The purpose of this post is to introduce a user to the nmap command line tool to scan a host and/or network, so to find out the possible vulnerable points in the hosts. You will also learn how to use Nmap for offensive and defensive purposes.

Say hello to colordiff

colordiff is a wrapper for diff and produces the same output as diff but with coloured syntax highlighting at the command line to improve readability. colordiff has been tested on various flavours of Linux and under OpenBSD, but should be broadly portable to other systems.

The HTTP 2xx class of status codes indicates the action requested by the client was received, and processed successfully. HTTP/1.1 200 OK is the standard response for successful HTTP requests. When you type www.cyberciti.biz in the browser you will get this status code. The HTTP/1.1 206 status code allows the client to grab only part of the resource by sending a range header. This is useful for:

Understanding http headers and protocol.

Troubleshooting network problems.

Troubleshooting large download problems.

Troubleshooting CDN and origin HTTP server problems.

Test resuming interrupted downloads using tools like lftp or wget or telnet.

Test and split a large file size into multiple simultaneous streams i.e. download a large file in parts.

Reading an IP address in a shell script requires many time and various Linux distributions stores IP address in different text files. So most of us end up writing shell pipes/scripts to get the information using ifconfig | grep 'inet addr:'| grep -v '127.0.0.1' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}' syntax. There is an alternative to ifconfig+shell pipe hack – ifdata command. It is a little know tool that can be used to check for the existence of a network interface and find out info about your interface such as IP, netmask, MTU and much more. No need to write shell pipes and fetch information via ifconfig or ip command. This command is designed to be easily used by a shell script.

Shutter is a free, open-source, and feature-rich screenshot tool for GNU/Linux distributions. I use this tool frequently when I am creating resources for this site or for our youtube channel and it has not yet let me down.

Most sysadmin will run low on disk space. Users will demand more space and you need to free space. You will find out files that’s a waste of space and delete it or move to an archive medium. But, how do you find the right files to delete that can help recover maximum space? Say hello to agedu tool (pronounced as ‘age dee you’) – it scans a directory tree and produces reports about how much disk space is used in each directory and subdirectory, and also how that usage of disk space corresponds to files with last-access times a long time ago. In other words, this command might help you to free up disk space.